Biology and Destiny

As a natural scientist, this Nature vs Nurture, or the ‘Biology-is-Destiny’ debate has always annoyed me, simply because it is assumed that for a characteristic to be biological, or ‘natural’, it therefore must be ‘fixed’ or immutable, unchangeable. 

Biology is NOT Destiny, for any species. This is fact, not speculation.

Nature is dependent on change and adaptation, not fixed in concrete, stone or genetic hard-wiring.  That is species-suicide, or at least species-stagnation, even for plants. Adapt or die.   Its an even more ridiculous concept when relating to homo sapiens sapiens – our species has not lived as a purely biological organism for uncounted millennia. Layers upon layers upon layers of civilisation, religion, tradition, education, culture, language, abstract thought etc have almost wiped off the physical biological map most of ‘fixed’ biological instincts and drives belonging to our evolutionary ancestors. Our species has made both conscious and unconscious decisions regarding biological processes ever since it crawled out of the primeval slime.  Along with many other so-called ‘higher’ species, particularly of the mammalian kingdom.

For example, the biological instinct or ‘urge’ to void bladder or bowel is a simple biological fact of life for most animals. Many species do it immediately when the urge arises, wherever or whenever they happen to be. Humans learned to control or adapt this biological urge, we teach our young as a matter of course and we even teach the creatures who share our homes.  Most higher species are ‘soft-wired’, not ‘hard-wired’, like right or left-handedness, a preference that can adapt. Human or mammalian sexuality and reproduction are no different.

It seems the social constructions that are the most ‘hard-wired’ and ‘fixed’, historically have proven unable to be changed, challenged or even questioned!

From most feminist discourse the issue of biological determinism, or even cultural constructs of any form, shape or model of an innate female sense of identity is discredited, or thrown as an insult (or politely termed a ‘critique’) onto other brands of feminism.

Notably towards radical feminists, who are often criticised for being ‘essentialist’ or ‘cultural’ feminists, or at least being naïve, to posit the possibility of a unique ‘female identity’, based on any universalisms, including mechanisms of patriarchal oppression.

Sex and Destiny: Sexuality

“The mythology of the female orgasm could be considered the last ideological push of the heterosexual establishment…….Nothing however, could disguise the fact from women at least, that,
where male sexual response tends to the mechanical,
female response continues to manifest as unpredictable and variable…..
A man who knows which buttons to press to get his partner to come….is seeking to produce in his partner stereotyped factory orgasms rather like his own….

Only lesbians were able to handle the idea that female sexuality might not be symmetrical with male sexuality, and that reconstructing it to fit might result in a net loss of delight.” Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman – 1999    

On one level, I have often been amused by sex researchers’ attempts to scientifically describe female sexuality in terms of male sexuality. As a young woman discussing sexual matters with others, I was often struck by our lack of words with which to articulate our feelings and discoveries, whether lesbian or heterosexual.  Nothing that was used to describe male sexual responses seemed to ‘fit’ what I, or other women, had experienced.  

Almost, but not quite.

This reconstruction of female sexuality to parallel that of males, including describing lesbian sexuality in terms of some kind of “mirror-image” of male homosexuality, does seem to parallel the reconstruction of all female biology.

In the search for ‘equality’ we seem to have settled for ‘equivalence’ of the kind that anything a man feels, a woman can too.

But anything a woman can feel and experience, but a man just can’t, just doesn’t exist.  

In her book Sex and Destiny, Greer outlines her perception of the changing social concepts of sexuality, in that she believes that the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ was co-opted by patriarchy, and turned into the new religion of the West: 

“Whether women like it or not, current sexual mores are conditioning them to become clitorally centred: their sexuality is being conditioned into the likeness and the counterpart of masculine response……Female sexuality has been tailored, pared-down, snipped to fit male inadequacy. One-dimensional man has been joined by his one-dimensional woman.” 

Male sexuality is fixated upon genitals and penetration, and “factory orgasms” with the ultimate goal being an orgasm. Therefore – according to males, so must female sexuality,  in order to be ‘human’, it must be defined in terms of male biological experience of sexuality.

Women and men are ‘equal’ right?     Its religious nature underpins the consumer economy, which is also fixated on penetration of markets. The explosion of increasingly bizarre pornography, paraphilias, prostitution and sex-trade trafficking, has, at least partly, resulted from its promotion as the new ‘Opiate of the Masses’ – if you aint coming, you aint living, and true to its liberal roots, this new religion also embraces homosexuality in its ritual observances and homage to the Holy Orgasm. Also included are the ageing and elderly, with Viagra for men, and HRT to help post-menopausal women retain orgiastic potential.

The Celibate is ex-communicated from this new Church.  

Sex and Destiny: Gender identity

 “The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Like whites playing “black face”, he plays at incorporation of the oppressed role without being incorporated in it.” Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology – 1978

Many of us who grew up in the liberal/humanist/socialist tradition often accept male-born transgendered people as ‘women’ because of a complete mind-boggling insanity denying the facts of biology, physics and chemistry.  Socially constructed insanity I might add.   

Many born women do reconstruct themselves to ‘fit’ male definitions of femininity in its various forms, much as male-born transgendered people do. Biologically speaking, this version of male-defined definition of femininity either removes the clitoris or reconstructs it as an ‘equivalent’ version of the penis in born-women. Breasts are denied any function other than decorative, the vagina is an artificial cavity without complex musculature or nervous system of its own, (ie forced to “fit” within male pelvic structures) and the uterus, ovaries and other female musculature and biochemistry disappears altogether.  From any of the traditional viewpoints, be it essentialist, or biological determinist, or complete social constructionist – I find it difficult to accept human bodies reconstructed to mimic female physicality can be included in the category ‘Woman’ however ill-defined and problematic that category may be.

Femininity, (and masculinity), in all its various forms (and there are a lot of them), is totally a social construction, but is always a male construction based on male-bodied life experience, and any *bits* of female-bodied life-experience which don’t correspond to male experience, are removed from the Human Condition altogether.

Erasure and denial of femaleness, and replacing it with male-bodied definitions of femininity, is something women are socially conditioned to share with men the world over. Men hate women, and so women hate women too, and in particular, we are taught to hate the femaleness in our own bodies and those of other women.  We are trained and conditioned into masochism of the female body.

In human females the expression of Self-Hatred and masochistic rituals is displayed in many ways, some socially acceptable or promoted and marketed as desirable, eg the global beauty industry,  shoes, cosmetics, clothing, the public ‘uniforms’ of masochistic femininity.  Other displays of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome of ‘femininity’, are a myriad of eating disorders, self-harming behaviours, (from self-cutting to ‘choosing’ prostitution), to surgical body reconstructions and drug and alcohol abuse.

The male-born transgendered people socially reinforce an underlying concept of the inherent body masochism of femininity, as being the sole and only definition of womanhood,  in Erasing femaleness.  The female-born transgendered are erasing femaleness in their bodies, through masochistic self-harm which is still the hallmark of femininity.

Sex & Destiny – Part 2 – Reproduction

With the female components of biological reproduction, the final chapters of reconstruction are almost complete with the introduction of assisted reproduction technologies and associated laws governing them. Childbirth was one the first to be reconstructed by males into an institution for male benefit, leading to the tortured deaths of millions of women over more than two centuries in Europe, as pointed out in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born .

Birthing had to be at male convenience, and by male design, whether of domesticated animals or of women.  It was treated by men as similar to a stubborn bowel obstruction, as that is how their bodies work. Males can’t do it – therefore it is an aberration, a ‘Misfit’ piece of awkward non-male and therefore non-human biology that needs some sort of surgery to ‘fix’. If physical surgery/reconstruction won’t fix it – then social surgery will have to do.  

As Mary Daly pointed out in her discussion of the characteristics of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome, such torture rituals usually start in the upper and middle-classes, become fashionable and spread downward over time.  Just like marriage did. The first women to submit to the knives and torture of the man-midwives in the middle-ages, were the royal wives of European nobility.

No wonder women welcomed and demanded the introduction of chloroform by the 19th Century. Women in modern Western hospitals of 1999, still routinely have their genitals mutilated during hospital childbirth.  British feminists have established support groups for women who have suffered major genital damage as a result of such mutilations, as damaging as rape and often more so.  It is exactly the same as FGM, it is just another long historical cultural tradition of cruelty to women. It is no wonder then, that many women having been mutilated in one childbirth, or fearing such mutilation after hearing the stories of their sisters, mothers, friends – would prefer, request, choose and even demand aneasthetised Caesarian section. By late 20^th Century, we have midwives charged with child endangerment, or in some places, midwifery is even illegal with heavy criminal penalties attached. But we don’t burn them at the Stake anymore.  For even amongst other primates, and many other higher mammals on earth,  the oldest female profession is midwifery, not prostitution, that came much later in human (ie male) social constructions.   

Less well known is a similar Sado-Ritual Syndrome surrounding lactation. Although many women will continue to whisper their testimony to the whole-body not-quite-sexual eroticism of breastfeeding in kaffee-klatsches and suburban play-group centres, most Western women still don’t breastfeed or if they do, not for very long. ie. “the minimum necessary”.  One friend of mine, said “Don’t ever tell men how you feel, or they will force us to cut off our breasts at puberty.” 

Its like women are not allowed to enjoy any bits of their bodies, that do not conform or correspond to a male biological counterpart.   

Mothers who breastfeed for too long, too often, or in public (ie male spheres) are seen as an aberration. Despite a push by women’s health-workers in recent decades to reverse this process, it has been less than successful.  As with childbirth, males can’t do it – therefore it is an aberration, a ‘Misfit’ piece of biology that needs some sort of surgery to ‘fix’. If physical and medical surgery/reconstruction won’t fix it – (as in remove it like an “unneccessary”intestinal appendix),  then social surgery will have to do.

Previous generations, in the middle-ages and through the nineteenth century saw upper-class women abandoning breastfeeding of their own children or forced and coerced to by their menfolk, and so it was left to servant and slave-women to do it, the invisible ‘wet-nurses’. In the 20th century, the removal of breastfeeding by the formula-bottle, allowed many more women in all socio-economic classes to abandon such stigmata of lower-class slavery. 

With recent technological advances, we are just beginning to see the beginnings of the removal of pregnancy. Upper-class wealthy women can hire a surrogate womb, just as previous generations hired wet-nurses. Like the wet-nurses, the gestational mother, or surrogate ‘womb-for-rent’ is the least paid, the least visible, the least valued and is given at best, token respect for her altruism. So is the nanny or au-pair, and the day-care creche workers, and the pre-school kindy teachers, who are amongst the lowest paid and lowest-status workers. With high-profile trials of murderous and incompetent nannies, we can’t even trust our servant classes to be mothers anymore. But not to worry, within 30-50 years, maybe earlier or later, it can be taken over by machinery for all socio-economic classes and that mythical all-powerful, pregnant, child-feeding, child-tending, or child-teaching woman can be completely dispensed with. And good riddance, is heard by all. 

Its interesting with the recent splits of biological ‘mothers’ – ie. genetic mother, the gestational mother and the social mother. Men of course, can also be genetic parents, and social parents, hence these roles are socially valued accordingly.  

However, the mental gyrations that masculinist biologists had to go through to ‘reconstruct’ the process of female ovum donation to be conform and be parallel to male sperm donation is mind-boggling. Young, healthy, pretty American and British women can now sell their ova via the internet. ‘Its no different to sperm donation’, they say.

Excuse me? When women can donate their ova via a 5-minute wank, I’ll believe that.

 So men and women are ‘equal’ as genetic parents, in this social reconstruction, if you can reconstruct the ovum to sperm as directly equal and equivalent pieces of biology. This Erases the critically important organelles of the ovum, including its own DNA separate to the cell nucleus. 

We can of course socially and surgically minimise and remove that from the equation, in order to force the concept in our brains that they indeed are exactly the ‘same’.  Again,  human (ie male) reconstruction of the facts of biology, physics and chemistry, in order to make it “fit” the way male bodies function.

 But males can’t gestate at all, or even come close, so the gestational female is the least valued, and worse for her, she can’t be reconstructed to fit a male biological ‘norm’. A Total Misfit.   As with lactating women, she must reconstruct herself to do it the way males can do it, or if that’s not possible, rendered invisible in a backroom in purdah, or held in social limbo,  until such time as we can dispense with her altogether.  

The legal ramifications are the most mind-boggling on pregnant women, for 9 months they are in legal limbo, ie not human, because there is no male biological counterpart.  Courts scratch their heads. She doesn’t “fit”. Especially surrogates. Therefore she/it does not exist, is not human, and hence logically, no human rights.   

As with Daly’s analysis about how such mechanisms are enforced – we could argue that the USA as a dominant world cultural force. The “upper-class” of all nations and cultures, so to speak. The adoption of commercial surrogacy, and its legalisation and promulgation in the USA during the 1980’s and 1990’s is not universally followed by other countries as yet – but the pressure is building, and will obviously be adopted by the rest of the world sooner or later, as it becomes more successful and cheaper. 

Sex and Destiny – Part 1 – Mating

 As we saw in the previous parts of the series, there are two main reproductive strategies for all living organisms –  the smaller, mobile, high-risk approach aimed at quantity of offspring, versus the nutrient-rich, larger, less mobile, in-for-the-long-haul approach for quality of offspring. Both approaches have costs and benefits, to individuals and to whole populations and species. Sometimes these two main reproductive strategies are unbalanced over the population, and in humans, to the detriment and “cost” to the female of the species.

Patriarchy has been reconstructing females and societies to conform to male (ie human) biological preferences and strategies for millennia, and convincing females that the male strategy is the only strategy.  Biology may well be Destiny, but it’s male biology. Culture may also be Destiny, but it’s a male culture.

One of the first bits of female biology to start reconstruction was mating behaviours and mothering behaviours, but more recently sexuality (or sexual practice) and sexual identity, has been also included to complete the ‘Final Solution to the Woman Question’, through Erasure of female biology and social identity from the ‘Human Condition’ altogether.

Mating, marriage and the erasure of female choice.

The first of female biological behaviours to be reconstructed, and ultimately institutionalised globally, was mating behaviour.  Female choice in mating is a powerful biological mechanism to counter-balance the male’s preferred mate-and-run strategy.  Although there remain remnants of human cultures which practice forms of female choice in cultural mating rituals –  generally female choice was wiped out in human reproductive strategies a long time ago – so long ago, that most never question human pair-bonding rituals, even assuming them to be ‘natural’.

For in Nature, pair-bonding in mammals in particular, even of the temporary or seasonal variety, is rare.  Mammals are generally weak on their own – even the predatory carnivorous ones. They live in packs, groups, pods, herds and so on.  Safety in Numbers. By definition, mammals bear live young which need long periods of care and investment to reach maturity.  One or two adults would never be enough in Nature. The Nuclear Family mating structure would be species suicide for humans, (and most mammals), totally dependent on local environment.  

War of the Sexes – Part 2

Part 2: COST-BENEFITS or “Do-the Add-Ups & Take-Aways”or who pays the “cost”? and who gets the “benefit”?

From Part 1 “.. In summary, from primordial times, this binary form of reproduction has resulted in very different methods and strategies, for each to maximise its chances of successful offspring”.   

While there are numerous speculations on why sexual reproduction, and diploidy (ie double-stranded DNA) evolved, one of the more common lines of thought, is that asexual reproduction, or cloning, especially single-stranded,  is doomed to failure over time.

This is because of the “Xerox problem”. Take a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy enough times, and your image will fade. Errors creep into DNA, and over the generations, information is lost, the errors and blank spots become so many that the organism becomes unable to sustain itself.  If all the members of a population are copies of each other the whole population dies out. Doubling the DNA from absorption from an external source, allows a greater chance for the errors to be corrected by the presence of a ‘good copy’.

Another related reason, is based on the principle of conservation of energy.  All life, needs to absorb nutrients and convert those nutrients to energy for growth and survival.  Minimum energy input is enough for minimum maintenance, but reproduction, even at its most simple through doubling of a parent cell – needs much more energy, than mere survival and maintenance does.

Weak cells with limited nutrients, may still have enough energy stores to double, but ending up with two smaller, compacted cells each time it divides, sacrificing other biological mechanisms to maintain the survival of just its central core.  This way it minimises its energy needs, while still having a chance of its ‘core’ being picked up by a larger cell.  Motility and speed are the drivers of this reproductive method towards quantity, and self-sacrifice - often trading off longevity and survival (with higher energy costs) for the chance to pass on its genes. Quickly producing multiple small fast short-lived mobile copies of itself, increases the chance further that one or two will get picked up by larger nutrient-rich cells, and incorporate its core in the next generation.

Other benefits of sexual reproduction are assisting in the spread of advantageous genes, and assisting in the elimination of disadvantageous genes, hence the drive towards quality with increased energy investment.  Some species of plants and water-based creatures, alternate asexual reproduction with sexual methods in alternate generations depending on environment.  Asexual reproduction with high quantity/ minimum energy can fill ponds or other ecosystems very quickly with clones. As the population reaches maximum and some die off due to lack of nutrients, they switch to sexual reproduction to maximise quality of fewer offspring.

In flowering or sexually reproducing plants, many can self-fertilise being hermaphroditic, but this sacrifices quality for maintenance/survival. Others need to cross-fertilise with another individual, and some plants have distinctive separate male and female individuals. The male cell, or pollen in plants, is produced in larger numbers, is small and often motile with or without assistance from other species.  The female is larger again, forming fruit or other high nutrient casings for the seed(s) or embryo(s). 

War of the Sexes : Part 1

Part 1 NUTRITION, SURVIVAL and REPRODUCTION

The first Law of Nature on Earth, is that sufficient numbers of individuals of organisms must survive long enough to reproduce. If not enough survive, if not enough reproduce, the species dies out. Since all living things die, Nature selects for those groups of organisms which have successful ways of not just surviving but reproducing. The most misquoted, misinterpreted and misunderstood section of Charles Darwin’s discussion of Natural Selection in evolution is “survival of the fittest”. It should more appropriately be read as ‘survival of the fit enough’.

The oldest and simplest form of reproduction is single cell division to form a clone or ‘daughter’ cell. Most single-celled organisms reproduce this way. Prokaryotes are single-cell organisms with no nucleus or other identifiable cellular organelles, and its DNA is diffused throughout the cell. The primordial Earth environment had no protective atmosphere or ozone layer to filter the sun’s radiation. These early single cells of life were prone to UV radiation damage, especially with no protective nuclear membrane for their DNA.

From the earliest beginnings, reproduction has involved exploitation, conflict, and compromise between individuals. All organisms must “eat”, they need to metabolise nutrients to gain the chemical energy needed to push the chemical reactions to grow, replace or repair damaged cell components, and especially to  reproduce.  Even the simplest cloning cell-division reproduction method, requires doubling of every cellular component, and so, only the largest, healthiest nutrient-rich cells would have energy resources and get a chance to divide and split into two.

They could not have absorbed enough from the primordial chemical soup, especially if damaged. The most likely method to ensure survival, was to “eat” or cannibalise each other. In prokaryote cells, the DNA of a damaged cell being eaten would be absorbed into the ‘eater’ cell, to form raw material or ‘building blocks’ for the cell to repair and replace its own damaged DNA and other cellular furniture. If they absorbed enough other cells, any additional nutrients to basic survival and maintenance could then be stored and used to provide sufficient ‘power’ for the doubling of all their cell furniture, including DNA, and split into two cells.

Those cells able to scavenge well enough amongst the remains of their more damaged neighbours were the ones that survived and reproduced most successfully. Sometimes fragments of the DNA from the eaten cells might be incorporated intact, into the new daughter generation of cells. An early form of promoting genetic variation.

A binary model of reproductive strategies started to evolve in tandem in the earliest life forms, eons before true sexual reproduction appeared.  Small cells versus bigger cells.  Smaller cells traded off or ’sacrificed’ size, longevity and nutrient energy needs of maintenance and growth, to be more opportunistic in reproduction, taking in just enough energy to maintain their DNA core, ensuring the insertion of their DNA into the larger, more nutrient rich cells, often dying in the process but ensuring that their genetic material had some chances of living on by being incorporated into the DNA of the larger cells.

The next step was to form eukaryote cells, with a nuclear membrane to provide some protection for the now single-stranded DNA deep inside the cell and separate it from other cell furniture. This allowed a better chance of protection from being completely ‘eaten’ and a chance to replace and repair damage, and also allowing genes to still survive intact, into the next generation, being harder to fragment. However, this larger more complex cell structuring needs more energy to maintain itself, with little left over for the enormous energy requirement of doubling in size and substance to clone a daughter cell. So more energy was being stored for defence and maintenance of its genetic ‘core’ from other predatory cells. The larger cells became more long-lived with a defence capability, but also less fertile, in that they reproduced less often, but more successfully when they did. Some severe human diseases are caused by long-lived, but slow reproducing bacteria, such as those causing leprosy and tuberculosis. They have such efficient tough defence membranes that they are often difficult to treat taking many months or even years of treatment with specialised drugs. 

In some single cell bacteria, a form of sexual reproduction has evolved, known as “bacterial conjugation” in which neither cell dies in a ‘mating’. Some cells in a population contain F-factor genes (or Fertility-factor genes), on a separate small strand of DNA close to the cell membrane surface (known as a plasmid), which is separate to its core DNA strand or chromosome. F+ cells are donors of the F-Factor genes, F- cells are recipients of F-factor alien DNA (with subsequent daughter clone cells being F+), F0 can neither donate or receive, and F1 (or F-‘prime’) are F+ donors, that can donate other core genes as well as the F-factors. Bacterial conjugation, or transfer of F-Factors, and other stray genes between cell lines, is one of the most common causes of antibiotic resistance developing in bacteria.

This takes extra time, energy and effort, which is a “cost” or “risk” to the organism, but the reward or return on such “investment” is in more successful reproduction.

The next step is in moving from single-strand DNA organisms to creating diploid organisms, species which have two copies of all the genes required for survival of the organism, in double-stranded helical DNA. These organisms have developed specialised cells that reproduce in the cloning way for organs and tissues. This is still a cloning reproduction, where cells double in size then split off into two identical cells. This is mitosis, how the cells of the body of all organisms divide and grow.

And also specialised cells for reproduction. They form cells known as gametes which are haploid, with single DNA. The cells divide twice without doubling in size, so only one copy of the DNA is stored in the gamete.

In biological jargon, the form of a species which forms specialised cells for the donating of genetic material, is arbitrarily defined as the “male”, and the form which makes specialised cells for the receiving of the donated material, the “female”.

Gene Thieves – Misogyny in Sci-Fi

A warning post, in case anyone feminist-minded, is accidentally sucked in to reading this.

The sci-fi thriller ‘Gene Thieves’ by Maria Quinn is being hailed in book reviewer circles, including in the Lawyers Weekly.

I could not get past page 70-something after the surrogate mother is killed, because the woman-hating misogyny was so depressing.  A near-future world where women are still nothing but pornified fucktoys, air-headed bimbos and walking incubators. And of course, all the men are Heros – with a capital H - (especially the lawyers).

My only excuse for picking it up was the blurb synopsis sounded interesting.  

In this future world, marriage has long gone, and replaced by Conjugal Contracts for up to 5 years.  Few people have their own children, other than the desperately poor, and the use of surrogacy through IVF is common, by singles or couples under contract. Surrogate women are paid very well for their services. It is common for young women to undertake a surrogacy contract to obtain their own ‘Nest Egg’.  

Dr Mitchell “Piggy” Brown, is a lonely genetic scientist who strikes it rich and desperately wants a child, but somewhat different, as he wants to use an embryo from his own parents eggs and sperm. Not quite legal, he turns to a lawyer,  ”Dancer” for help. Dancer recognises Piggy from boyhood school days as a boy taunted for his unfortunate looks, where the nickname Piggy comes from. In guilt for his childhood bullying, Dancer agrees to help.

Dancer turns to ’The Nest’, the official centre for surrogates, and obtains the service of a surrogate who wont ask too many questions about the baby she will be incubating for Piggy, and ends up with Angela, who comes with  a 6-year old daughter, Molly.

The book then turns into a crime thriller, many of the characters have secrets within secrets, and Angela is murdered, the baby boy is kidnapped for ransom by a multinational pharmaceutical company cartel, as Piggy Brown has discovered the secret of the genetic ‘fountain of youth’, the immortality gene.   Dancer and Piggy are joined by Jack Lee, Chief Investigator for the UN Ethical Science Council – and our Holy Trinity of squeaky-clean angelic male Heros is complete – as the blurb says so dramatically:  ”Jack has to take charge of the case – for the sake of humanity’s future”

While the book is being lauded for its exploration of “ethics”, the ethics of female-subordination and exploitation is never questioned, indeed it is extended and improved upon.

For example, Marina, Dancer’s current Conjugal Contract “wife” is the resident psychiatrist at The Nest, and is an unprofessional pornified fucktoy, responsible for the “mental health” of the surrogates.  At one point she calls Angela “a cow of a mother” and discusses her personal opinions about her surrogate clients at home in bed with Dancer – how’s that for professional ethics?  Indeed, everybody hates Angela, she’s not very pretty for a start. Piggy Brown is not very pretty either, obviously, but everybody feels sorry for him.

Since Angela is such a terrible mother (not that we see any real evidence of this), cute little Molly forms a loving bond with Piggy,  to become her ”dad”.

There are many comments about how some couples are so fussy that the surrogate must look pretty and be well-educated.  Some say, they dont understand, its just the uterus, doesn’t matter if she’s mentally retarded, fat and ugly.

All the women put men first before children (a few put sons first – but never daughters – if no man around), but Angela is hated because she puts herself first before children or men, and is presented as a rare psychotic syndrome. 

The male characters are either fucking women left, right and centre and giggling about it, or are found  pontificating in poetic drama about their sainted dead mothers, and Dancer is heartbroken and devastated when he finds out his mother did something illegal before she died. Or,  they are bonding with each other in deep personal friendships. Whereas the women all hate each other, and act petty and spiteful. Both Dancer and his male partner in the law firm, have children without mothers in the picture - Dancer has a 16-year-old daughter Daisy who is an air-headed teen bimbo worrying about her toe-nail colour.  The message is loud and clear, men are the best parents and mothers should just fuck off and/or die.

There are hints with the crime thriller theme, that one of the undercover operatives of the multinationals is a big muscled butch dyke. When Angela is violently murdered during labour giving birth to Piggy’s genetic brother, NOBODY gives a stuff - she is not considered human.  It was not even considered much of a crime by the major characters.  (She was insane anyway).

Thats when I had to throw the book away as I couldn’t tolerate it anymore.

Postcards from the Plate (Part 3)

Food as Language.

Food as Porn.

“In some recent poststructuralist work, food (and the mother’s breast) has also been specifically associated with words and self-representation (or identity). This association is foregrounded in Kristeva’s scenario of abjection in which food symbolically competes with words. But we also find it articulated in recent work addressing prohibitions or disciplinary protocols used to control groups who might other wise be perceived as unruly. Less well theorized, but certainly evident in a wide range of narratives about the forging of individual, national and diasporic identities are more positive definitions and descriptions of food as consolidating communities or genealogies ranging from the family to the nation…. – Cross-Cultural Perspectives On Women, Identity, Food – University of British Colombia Workshop, 1998

Food as Language? Food for Thought, indeed.

Woman’s Language. Woman’s Words.

Women’s Business. Women’s Work.

Double, double, toil & trouble. Fire burn, cauldron bubble. Eye of newt, tongue of toad. Famous murderesses are the poisoners. Mad, mad women slump, thump around kitchens, expressing madness with pale offerings, melted plasticware, burnt offerings, lime & bitters. Eve and Snow White, seduced by an apple, witches have insatiable appetites.

Puberty Blues girls mustn’t eat in front of the boys they want to impress – to do so breaks a rule.  A ‘disciplinary protocol’ to control the ‘unruly’?

Announcement for a Radical Lesbian Feminist Festival – When, Where, and What’s to Eat? “….for anyone who wants to come early to help chop vegetables and plan the revolution.” – Food is Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Work – even for Revolutionaries. More “positive definitions …… consolidating communities“?

Language of Food, is Language of Solidarity as well as Division. Women United/Divided by Food.  The bulk of agricultural workers are women, the bulk of food processing workers are women, the bulk of food is sold, prepared, cooked, bartered, carried, and shared by women.

What messages we send through food! Pleasing mothers-in-law, grandmothers, getting-to-know-you – we instinctively offer food, or help out in the kitchen – holiday dinners, afraid to offend, or quick to offend in our rebellion/rejection of the Language of Women. We know how much it means to them to communicate through the food they’ve prepared. We *hear* other women’s messages encrypted in the stuffing, salads, desserts, sauces. We both Love/Hate it as Bonding/Bondage.

Food is the Language of Women. Food is Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Words, Women’s Work – We grow, harvest, pound, grind, shell, slice, chop, julienne, grate, sift, squeeze, pinch, knead, roll, bake, saute, fry, grill, shred, blend in instinctive and conditioned rituals – too much, too little – never sure, the agony and the ecstasy – we love/hate our food Bondage/Bonding.

TV ads – women serving food mountains-high, smiling beatifically at margarine. Dad gets take-away, but Mum’s hands are the ones to dish it up. Magazines for women, so many about food, catering, dinner-parties, healthy lunches for pre-schoolers, diets, ‘summer-slim’ recipes. Women always serving food, but never eating in ads – why is that?

Except maybe – snack-foods, directed at the adolescent market, when cartoon, or disembodied exaggerated feminine lips seductively lick phallic chocolate bars, or play, snatch, throw, steal them, peel them – but are not shown actually eating? What message does this Food Language send? The Pornography of Food? Woman is Object. Source of Nourishment, symbolic Fountain Breast of all pleasure – she provides pleasure with her hands this time – disembodied hands serve chicken nuggets fresh from the oven. Men and children eat. The woman smiles, radiant, standing while the subject eaters sit. There are none left for her – she doesn’t mind. The girls of Puberty Blues dispense burgers, chips – there is none for them – they don’t mind, they ate earlier, secretly - they smile, radiant their secret safe.  

Dainty morsels only when menfolk are around. So thoughtful women are, being cheap dinner dates. Binge, feast & puke when alone, or with the girlfriends, in secret. Men and children first, women must wait their turn.

Food as pornography, indeed. Popular misogynist relationship books, the Men are from Mars, Women From Venus books – men need ‘quickies’ the author says, for ’sustenance’, a maintenance ‘diet’, so to speak – if women love their man they will provide regular ‘quickies’,  the author says, and he will provide ‘home-cooked’ sex once a week – ‘gourmet’ sex once a month – in return. She must wait her turn, in return. She masturbates, silently, secretly in the bathroom.  Or binges and pukes.

Reminder of the old hunter/gatherer paradigm. Hunter food is not regular day-to-day sustenance food, it is ‘feast’ food, ‘party’ food – it is rare, special, an occasional ‘treat’ – provided by the male. The greatest chefs in the world are men we are told. Sustenance diet of ‘quickies’ in bed, and ‘quickies’ on the breakfast table are Women’s Business, Women’s Work.

Messages of the Language of Food get mixed-up, mix-mastered, mashed, pulped, blended, dropped, lost, spoiled, boiled off, fallen, over-cooked, burnt, too cold, too stale, too hot, too spicy, hunger, hurt – tones/tomes overloaded with too much salt or sugar, pleasure or pain.

Anorexia. Bulemia. Mad, Mad Women. Misfit women, earth-mothers, laughed at – their contribution to nutrition/nurture not valued. Weight-watchers. Junkie women extol the virtues of appetite suppression by heroin, cocaine, speed, crack.  Diseases of heart, kidneys, thyroid, are wondrous for appetite-suppression. Misfits. Diets. Obsessions. Cravings. Chocaholics. Sweet-tooth. Church functions – the invitation reads ‘Ladies, please bring a plate’. Bake-sales – out of fashion now, our grandmothers wistful for cinnamon, home-made ginger nuts, lamingtons.

Misfit women pay homage to the Joy/Despair of Food, Life, Love, Women – chopping vegetables for the Revolution, chopping their bodies. Diabetes. Heart disease. Iron-deficiency. Blood thin, blood-letting. Tiredness, lethargy, allergies. Diet Coke. Take-out, take-away, disposable. Daytime TV discusses stomach-stapling surgery and the Joy of Herb Gardens.  Binge, feast & puke when alone, or with the girlfriends.

Mad, Mad Women – we come to love/hate food, we starve, we purge, we feast and stuff, we hunger, we feel for bruised tomatoes, pick carefully through apples, obsessed with ‘purity’ we cuddle our half-litre bottles of water to flush away the poisons, we love/hate our bodies, love/hate our Selves.

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Oh girls, girls, Silly little valuable things,

You should have said, No, I am valuable,

And again, It is because I am valuable I say, No.

Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays. — ‘Stevie’ Smith

 

Postcards from the Edge of the Plate (Part 2)

“…the egg the female brings to maturity is a complete feeding mechanism…..the devaluation of the milk that has no price-tag is part of the generalised devaluation of women’s bodies and contributions to the nourishment of the race, a devaluation that is now reaching its nadir in a distorted attitude to food on the part of women themselves……..The pattern of devaluing women’s contribution is as old as human civilisation. Clearly food production and consumption have changed vastly since industrialisation, but the devaluation of women’s contribution remains a constant.”– The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer, 1999

THE MOTHER AND FOOD

“….A significant portion of this work situates mothers as the nexus between food and pathology. Indeed, since the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis with its focus on oedipal narratives of subject formation, mothers have been a particular focal point and the move from this to women and food has often been made, both in the negative terms which “blame” mothers for eating disorders, and in the more positive social goals that inform movements such as La Leche. – Cross-Cultural Perspectives On Women, Identity, Food – University of British Colombia Workshop, 1998

Its all our mothers fault. Got it.

Play-groups, inner-city creches, mothers, babies, toddlers underfoot – the Lebanese women laugh at us for snatching away the nuts, at our fear of babies choking on them. In Lebanon, nuts are the traditional first-solids & their babies don’t choke, they say. A Turkish mother, heavy in black asks ‘Why can’t you white women feed your babies? ” – defensiveness, mumblings of ‘my doctor said..’- ‘I work, you see…’, ‘I kept getting mastitis…’ blushing, awkwardness, changing the subject to something neutral – food, coffee, lunch. The Turkish woman offers to show us how to make baklava & Turkish coffee, to ‘make your milk strong for your babies’.

A lifetime of girltalk, cakes, biscuits, take-away, chocolate – feminist collectives discussing funding, submissions, actions, marches over crackers, dips, nibblies and cheap wine.

Kaffee-klatsches, coffee-mornings, brunches, kitchen-teas, baby and bridal showers – without men around we feast on Womens Business, Women’s Work.  Office buildings, middle-class professionals – organising office functions, women office workers pore over faxed menus, argue the relative merits of seafoods and soups.  ‘Let’s do lunch’ the office women say – and we discuss which restaurant, what sort of food, in Loving/Bonding detail.

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